Project partners

Charlotte Crofts is based at the Digital Cultures Research Centre, and is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and Video Production at UWE.

Calvium have worked successfully on many projects with research and arts organisations and have developed AppFurnace, a service which unlocks the mobile app market for creative industries.

Peter Insole created the website ‘Know Your Place’ for Bristol City Council, which provides access to layers of historic maps and images.

Journal Authors

Charlotte Crofts

Jo Reid

Peter Insole

Kieron Gurner

Richard Hull

City Strata

by Charlotte Crofts, Calvium and Bristol City Council

City Strata is a mobile platform which enables users to explore different layers of Bristol’s heritage, going back to the first maps of the city in 1750. The platform will enable developers to author location based experiences which include user generated and uploaded content.

The platform will be protoyped with the ‘Cinemap’ layer – which provides a way of navigating the city and experiencing Bristol’s cinematic heritage in the spaces where it actually happened. From the ghost of Robert Partington-Jackson, the murdered manager of the Odeon, Union Street, to Cary Grant’s childhood cinema on Clare Street.

Last week, we ran a couple of tests of our recent audio prototype, specifically testing the rough-cut audio tracks we’d made that expose the stories of the cinemas that used to stand in Castle Park.
The prototype was an audio tour of the park that’s triggered by GPS, with audio and old photographs that introduce the landscape of the park when it used to be Castle Street, one of Bristol’s main shopping centres. The audio in the current version are simple recordings of Charlotte and myself walking through the park, and relating the geography and stories we’ve collected about each cinema, to get an initial idea of how people relate to the type of content we’re planning on creating.

Over the past month, we’ve taken the project from initial concepts of how we thought people might use it, through a couple of user tests, and through a few design iterations from the feedback we’ve gained. So, in this post, I wanted to talk a bit about our design journey using AppFurnace, as we continue to make adjustments to our prototype - just before we launch into another round of tests with some more users this weekend.